The mind revealing itself to itself: the TOP 100 AMBIENT ALBUMS as voted by ILX

I had to put this at #1, I couldn't even begin to front. Been listening for 35 years and not tired of it yet.

also Robert Wyatt is the secret star on this

You deserve your badge.

2. Brian Eno: Ambient 4 - On Land (1982)
1193 points, 18 votes.

https://i.imgur.com/YAMKnFk.jpg?1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRiNpVslI_c

Ambient with Budd - ON LAND - its great mysteru

― | (Latham Green), Thursday, October 4, 2018 11:21 PM

DD: Is there something ironic about putting on a piece as still as 77 Million Paintings in somewhere so unstill?

Brian Eno: Well, when I lived in New York I made my quietest music. The record On Land (1982) I made here. And one of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you'd rather be in. Do you know what I mean? You try to make up for the deficiencies of the place that you're in, because New York is a hellish place to live. It's so noisy and always broken and always being mended and abrasive and disturbing. So one of the things you want is to find a little place where, 'Swooh', you can breathe out for a minute.

DD: Is it also a reaction to the increasing smallness of music?
Brian Eno: Yeah, I think it is. It's sort of a reaction against headphones, which I don't like. I don't like having the music pressed on to my head. I like feeling I'm walking around inside it.

This, alone, is intriguing and inspiring enough to fuel several different strains of creative activity, should one choose to embrace any of its ideas.

― Josh in Chicago, Saturday, July 12, 2014 4:23 PM

"The Lost Day"* has always been my jam from On Land, but I listened in greater detail than usual to the album rather than as background or falling asleep music and the (subtle!) tunes of a few other tracks became more apparent, so I'll be listening for them. partly because of the addition of Hassell (4/1) or Material (4/2), I feel like the side closers work a little against the mood of the first 3 on each side which are more of a piece, but it's pretty perfect as is.

*also like Eno's lost day concept: the things that didn't come to be. which could be read as the road not taken, in contrast to Another Green World aka the ultimately fertile other road (or art process) taken. but in "the lost day" I think Eno was nostalgic for better(?) futures that failed to materialize: other green potentials (or even things we didn't get to do).

― Paul, Monday, July 14, 2014 7:52 PM

I think "On Land" is a good thing to bring up, because I find that album, pretty as it is, much darker and more menacing (same with "Apollo," despite its blatant beauty), which in a way makes it more accessible. Or at least more overtly "interesting." His much later generative stuff, or even his asleep-at-the-DX7 stuff like Neroli and Thursday Afternoon, is more boring and invisible, sort of by design, I imagine, but both are firmly from his installation phase, with them devised explicitly as background support for visuals or other related concepts.

― Josh in Chicago, Thursday, August 23, 2018 11:28 PM

I'm not really fond of "ambient" as a catch-all term to encompass anything with low-to-no-BPMs which uses drifty soundscapey bits. So little of it paints a compelling portrait of 'place' or sonic geography in the way that, say, On Land did.

― Myke. (Myke Weiskopf), Saturday, September 30, 2006 8:04 PM

An ambient poll without Eno at #1 is embarrassing

SAW II is also RYM's highest rated ambient album of all time.

#2 is… the Silent Hill 2 soundtrack (Music for Airports is also at #3).

Exactly

It's worth comparing the two:

https://rateyourmusic.com/customchart?page=1&chart_type=top&type=album&year=alltime&genre_include=1&genres=Ambient&include_child_genres=t&include=both&limit=none&countries=

I feel like such an amateur ambient cop after LBI’s rejection of SAWII

i will gently push back on that rejection - SAWII is _extremely_ ambient to my ears, the very aural equivalent of spatial environments, some of which are vivid enough to be physically disorienting

Sui generis music that exists in a world by itself, too creepy to be ambient, too placid to be techno, too haunting and pretty to be industrial.

Plenty of (dark) ambient is deliberately creepy.

1/1: minimalism/modern classical: NOT AMBIENT
2/1: choral/new age: NOT AMBIENT
1/2: choral/new age: NOT AMBIENT
2/2: progressive electronic/Berlin school: NOT AMBIENT

Yeah I really don’t get it, myself, but whatever

the saw2 thing

1. Jean-Michel Jarre: Waiting for Cousteau (1990)
1195 points, 17 votes, 1 first place vote.

https://i.imgur.com/KloW1K9.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z9iZOiMEw

I have a soft spot for Jean-Michel Jarre. frogbs up the page mentions Sylvester Stallone, which is the kind of genius observation that brings me back to Ilxor every decade or so. Jean Michael Jarre is the Sylvester Stallone of electronic music. You know how some people like to synchronise Pink Floyd's "Echoes" with the last twenty minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey? You can do that with the careers of Sylvester Stallone and Jean Michel Jarre, and they line up almost perfectly. Slightly atypical initial hit; competent sequels; return to triumph in the mid-80s followed by rapid commercial decline; occasional attempts at artistic credibility; all ending with surprisingly competent rehashes of earlier ideas.

Think about it. Rendezvous is basically Rocky IV but as a piece of music - it's so bombastic and upbeat! It makes me wish I could go back in time and vote for Ronald Reagan. Revolutions is Rambo: First Blood Part II, slightly grimmer and not very well made although popular. They even begin with the letter R. R. It's not a coincidence.

I've always loved the way Jarre had this obvious burning desire to be taken seriously - along the same lines as Peter Gabriel or David Byrne - so his early albums have these little ambient vignettes and are like gateway drugs to hardcore ambient and systems music. At the same time he was never willing to abandon the mass market and go all the way. In my opinion the title track from Waiting for Cousteau is way up there with Global Communication's 76:14 as the best ambient music from the early 1990s but the album as a whole is dragged down by the television game show themes on side one.

I think Zoolook is his most successful go at crossing over into the high end of the mainstream. It's like liquid dayglo 1980s postmoderism. Memphis furniture design in audio form. But from what I remember it didn't chart very well, and by that time he was competing with e.g. Art of Noise. In my opinion his use of samples was more inventive than Art of Noise but he didn't have Paul Morley phoning up the NME every few minutes so Zoolook tends to be forgotten nowadays. I wonder if the critics disliked the fact he was the good-looking son of a successful composer who had access to masses of equipment; they never felt the need to give him any help.

I'm still impressed with the way that the bassline from Equinoxe V becomes the rhythm of Equinox VI, which turns into an awesome wobbly bass solo at the end, and then becomes the basic track for Equinoxe VII. That must have been very difficult in 1977 with eight-track tape and no MIDI sync. Almost as if he was a classically-trained musician who knew how to plan things out on paper. I think the composed aspect of his music appealed to me as a kid because I grew up with computer game soundtracks. His music was obviously written, not improvised; if you fiddle with the stereo balance control on his early records you can unpick the tracks and see how he built up the music because he used hard left-right panning.

He updated his sound effectively with Magnetic Fields, which sounds a bit like Depeche Mode albeit lusher. He then bought a Fairlight, which means that his 1980s albums sound very dated nowadays. Rendezvous mostly works. Revolutions has its moments, but that was the point when old-wave synth stars of his generation were left behind by acid house and drum'n'bass - the likes of Squarepusher and Autechre and Aphex Twin took up the torch, but they owed nothing to Jan Hammer and Vangelis and Jean Michel Jarre etc, they came from a completely different tradition.

I saw him live at Wembley for the Chronologie tour but I barely remember that album; Oxygene 7-13 was okay; Metamorphses felt like a misguided attempt to copy Air; I haven't heard a single note of his music after that. I remember reading that Cousteau was largely generated with software running on an Atari ST; the original recording was hours long, it would be great if it was released at some point.

― Ashley Pomeroy, Tuesday, November 27, 2018 12:55 AM

Let me decribe the tracks, then get an idea of the album:

Calypso Part 1: A steel drum piece that will make your day happy.
Calypso Part 2: My favorite of the album, it brings the image to your mind of a submarine submerging into the waters. It somewhat reminds me of the music on Donkey Kong Country 2, although it doesn't sound like it at all.
Calypso Part 3: A slow, melancolic piece, the guitar part is cool too.

― (Jon L), Monday, January 10, 2005 6:18 AM

I've always loved the way Jarre had this obvious burning desire to be taken seriously - along the same lines as Peter Gabriel or David Byrne - so his early albums have these little ambient vignettes and are like gateway drugs to hardcore ambient and systems music. At the same time he was never willing to abandon the mass market and go all the way. In my opinion the title track from Waiting for Cousteau is way up there with Global Communication's 76:14 as the best ambient music from the early 1990s

― Ashley Pomeroy, Tuesday, November 27, 2018 12:55 AM

I like Calypso pt. 1 a lot tho, because of its hilarious appearance in Olympic figure skating from time to time

― nevertheless, he stopped (flamboyant goon tie included), Tuesday, March 13, 2018 10:40 PM

Nice.

:D

LOL

I feel like such an amateur ambient cop after LBI’s rejection of SAWII

― brimstead, Tuesday, July 2, 2019 7:05 PM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

We're all amateur cops in the greater realm that is ambient.

I'm the blade runner of ambient

Tbf Oxygène and Équinoxe deserve to be on this list as much if not more than [redacted].

hahaha, and by 2 points it takes the #1 spot

That Silent Hill 2 soundtrack is excellent btw, but the pieces are all these short vignettes that manage to instantly set a certain mood. Not at all the kind of long-form meditative ambient that people tend to look for in album-length music.

We're all amateur cops in the greater realm that is ambient.

in this realm, the police show up and their sirens just make really deep
"wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom" noises that gradually become embedded in the surrounding environment

Armed with Buddha Machines instead of tasers.

ambient cops never do anything, they just park under a freeway and listen to radio dispatches at low volume

hey I'm on my break, cut me some slack

ambient police: never on the beat

They were on my tail once but then it started raining and they blended into their environment and I got away

xp Excellent

I can't tell if this is a joke or not.

that means it's a perfect ambient joke

ambient police: "FREEZE! and stay frozen. now everyone, just breathe and listen for a while."

I can’t tell if it’s music or not

ambient house police at the beatless ambient crime scene are like when the sheriff's department shows up to a police crime scene and things are awkward

So which ambient album best spells 'fuck tha ambient police'?

look folks Jean Michel Jarre has contributed more to the field of electronic music than Aphex Twin ever could so your "LOLs" are inappropriate here

^^ the ambient copper is right

the LOL is that SAWII didn't even place, I dig JMJ

you have the right to remain silent, but I don't need to tell you that

Part of the reason I liked Afx when I first heard his stuff is because I was weaned on J-M Jarre so: frogbs otm.

if you cannot afford album cover art featuring star fields, cities at night, or color gradients, one will be provided for you by youtube uploaders

SAWII more like SWATII amirite?

I'm sorry, folks, it seems I've made a miscalculation. :( "Waiting for Cousteau" is not actually #1 in the poll, in fact it didn't receive any votes at all. I'll post the correct result in a jiffy.

shocked that Soliloquy for Lilith didn't place

I went back on forth on that one but I think I ended up voting for it

1. Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works Volume II (1994)
1745 points, 22 votes, 4 first place votes.

https://i.imgur.com/O6joZGg.jpg?1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S8gf4S-1iI

This album.. Listening again for the first time in years and it's still fantastic. I'm definitely hearing things in this I never noticed back when.

― Fox Mulder, FYI (dog latin), Wednesday, November 15, 2017 12:32 PM

I have never found this record creepy. is wonder creepy? this record is too architectural to be creepy. it's like Shadow of the Colossus, or that Borges story where the guy finds the city of the immortals. it's the feeling of wandering around mysterious ruins, washed out by too-bright sunlight, knowing that there is no other human being within a hundred miles or a thousand years. there is a word for that feeling, but creepy is not that word.

― bernard snowy, Monday, July 16, 2007 6:23 AM

SAW II is gorgeous, terrifying, and mysterious. I automatically lose a glimmer of respect for someone when they dis' this record -- assholish I know, but I can't help it. It's not so much losing respect as it is just wondering if our brains all have the same parts and regions and stuff, because I cannot imagine not being moved by this album. The microtonality? the robot big-band hip-sashaying ambient boogie? yes, it's all there, and there's a lot more there, a whole world of light and shade, plush organic squish and hard gleaming inhuman shine, a record that plays the listener, scritching at the cerebral cortex, knotting neural pathways, whispering to our deepest fears -- aural, tactile fears we can never quite fully apprehend.

― Clarke B. (Clarke B.), Wednesday, April 7, 2004 3:44 AM

This album works better when you sequence the songs in alphabetical order, from "Blue Calx" to "Z Twig." Gets less ambient and more out-there, and then "Z Twig" is the sound of waking up to a bright sunshiney morning.

― Mr. Snrub, Wednesday, November 15, 2017 4:24 PM

I hadn't realised that Apex had written linear notes for a few of the tracks on this site. About track 22 -

"Someone I used to know, you know who you are, worked as a cleaner in a police station and kindly pinched me a police interview tape. It was with a woman who murdered her husband, it's the background audio in this track."

― I am using your worlds, Wednesday, May 30, 2018 4:17 PM

also, as much as I love that Sabbath vol 4 won the metal poll, im fine with the pioneer not winning this one. SAW II is incredible. even today it continues to both freak me out and lull me to sleep.